As I see it, there are two kinds of people working in the public relations management milieu of European institutions: the ones that entertain romantic notions about the emancipatory potential of new media such as blogs and social networks and those that recognize Web 2.0 as yet another tool for managing and projecting the favourable image of the institution they work for.

When romantics enthuse about Facebook and Twitter ushering in a new era of participatory democracy, one should not merely smile.  Mistaking a pushing of the “like” button on Facebook for expression of political views or even political action can indeed be funny, but it’s also bad for the PR effort.

Mistaking a pushing of the “like” button on Facebook for expression of political views or even political action can indeed be funny, but it’s also bad for the PR effort.

Focus on allegedly emancipatory role of social media too hard, and you can lose sight of their potential as tools for ramming your message home.

As PR professionals we thrive on what the great American sociologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld called the narcotyzing dysfunction of the media – the latter inundate the public with unwieldy amount of information, so that people have no choice but to sit back and consume what is fed to them through various communication channels. Contemporary media landscape with new ways of communicating sprouting up everywhere thus offers a lot of opportunities for very efficient agenda-setting and brand management.

When people let their guard down, the last thing a PR professional should aim to do is to entice them to put it back again or, in other words, to emancipate the public, try to kick their critical faculties into action. This would amount to closing the window of opportunity. When the latter is wide open, courtesy of the media’s narcotyzing dysfunction, PR machinery should be focused on using all channels at its disposal to foster a favourable image and brand of the institution in the public arena.

In order to this in the most efficient way, any PR effort should aim for full-spectrum dominance; the choice of military metaphor is intentional.  It’s all about winning hearts and minds, on all fronts: press, TV, radio, the web. This is not to be confused with fostering democratic and pluralistic debate, although PR business is fraught with dangers of such collateral damage putting paid to even the most ingenious campaigns.

Come again? (from: http://skepticblog.org/wp-content/uploads/revolution-tweeted.jpg)

The European Parliament has recognized the importance of full-spectrum dominance by also focusing on web communications. In this way it cannot happen that its messages appearing in traditional media could be subverted on the web. The EP’s pages on the web, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace all project an image of the institution and its messages that are more or less consistent with those in the press. No PR professional in the Parliament wants a press article to start off a debate on whether the line taken by the EP is the right one; the same should hold for the EP’s activities on the web.

Catering to the elite

As I write these lines, I have my copy of the FT open on the comments section, there’s the latest European Voice somewhere in the drawer, not to mention The Economist on my bedside table, ready to lull me to sleep. To all those that warn about the threats that concentration of media ownership poses for the diversity of ideas in European public space, this surely sounds as an anathema. All of the above mentioned newspapers are namely published by Pearson, a UK media company, their target public being business and political types; it’s therefore not surprising that by and large they all toe the business-friendly editorial line.

They might not seem as such, but fiscal policy, derivatives regulation and bankers’ bonuses are politically highly charged issues in times of economic crisis. So it is particularly dangerous for a professional involved in these issues, either as a politician, journalist or a PR person, to have his views about the economic policy shaped by a very limited number of potentially biased sources.

Who sells what to whom?

As one cogent summary of Edward S. Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s classic text, Manufacturing consent, has it:

“It is clear that newspapers are not primarily in the business of selling a product to readers – they are in the business of selling wealthy audiences to advertisers. It is not just “that stories should increase readership or audience” – they should sell the right readership to the right advertisers.”

As a former editor-in-chief of a small niche newspaper, I can only attest to the accuracy of this analysis. Media content is consciously being produced in such a way as to set up a supportive environment for advertisers whose money pays the wages.

Taking the Wikipedia definition of biodiversity, “the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem … often used as a measure of the health of biological systems”, we may safely conclude that European public space is not very well served by a relatively small number of influential media having a limited scope of views on offer.

Blogs to the rescue

Luckily, however, world wide web (WWW) is another ecosystem altogether. Although democratic to a fault, giving just anybody a chance to speak his or her mind on anything and then publish it for everybody to see, a number of high-quality blogs have undermined the traditional media by offering a wider array of opinions that run counter to those promoted in the mainstream. Take the debt problems plaguing the European economy.

Taking their cue from textbook economics, all European governments are engaged in deficit cutting that is supposed to lay foundations for stronger growth in the future. The majority of pundits and journalists see this as a painful but necessary belt-tightening. But not the blogosphere.

The roll call

Here’s where the blogs come in. They allow economists such as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman to provide up-to-date commentary of economic developments that does not really fit into the business pages of a newspaper. They allow senior officials such as former chief economist of the IMF Simon Johnson to air unorthodox views about economic policy that hardly feature in mainstream coverage of economic issues. And then there are Cassandras (Edward Hugh’s EuroWatch, for example) who forecast the troubles the eurozone now finds itself mired in when mainstream media still applauded the EU for its dexterity to avoid the American-style financial meltdown.

But something certainly has changed since I was churning out agency news a couple of years ago. For me, the blogosphere has taken over from elite media as the provider of high-quality analysis of economic issues. It is always very interesting to contrast the latter with newspaper columns as it allows one to tease out hidden assumptions that govern the media construction of reality. At a time when debates rage about who is going to foot the bill of the crisis, bankers or taxpayers, blogs are becoming all the more important.

I had my first peek at the sleek tower of Brussels’ Hôtel de Ville from the doorstep of the city’s central train station, teeming, it seemed to me, with unsavoury characters which could have easily escaped from one of the adult-only comics sold in the station’s news shop.

Barely 18, I was going through that inevitable rite of passage for any would-be traveller, a rail tour of Europe, with just enough money to afford a dorm bed every night, but with just enough courage and youthful carelessness to crash under the stars (and an occasional raindrop) when I felt like it. You could say I am no stranger to French beaches from Côte d’Azur to Normandy.

It was mid-1990s and I was passing through Brussels on my way from swanky Paris to free-wheeling Amsterdam. The city didn’t make much of an impression on me. Crowds were squeezing into the Grande Place, it smelt of French fries and stale piss and you had to be very careful about animal excrements littering the streets. Paris, I thought to myself, but without the Eiffel tower.

Fast forward seven years or so. It’s a freezing, rainy afternoon as our plane touches the tarmac at Charleroi airport. Coming from Ireland’s west coast (Limerick, to be precise), the weather isn’t really something that bothers a bunch of MA in European integration students on their way to Brussels. Conversations mainly revolve around differences between Irish stouts and Belgian lady beers, as the Irish contingent in our expedition pejoratively calls them.

For me, however, this Brussels trip was less about beers and more about a decision to go all out for a career in European institutions. Maybe it was the audacious architecture of Berlaymont, stories galore about the sweet life of eurocrats or just the appealing smell of power in the halls of European Parliament  – from then on Brussels had a special place in my career plans, if not exactly in my heart.

Sure enough, three years later I was back again, this time as a stagiaire at the European Commission’s DG Trade. Strangely, I didn’t find it hard to survive on a paltry salary EU institutions give to their trainees. A studio, small but warm, in the heart of Ixelles, just across the street from pumping music of Matonge bars, was really all I needed to plunge headlong into the raw vigour that brews in Brussels’ bowels, a long way from glitzy EU palaces.

A studio, small but warm, in the heart of Ixelles, just across the street from pumping music of Matonge bars, was really all I needed to plunge headlong into the raw vigour that brews in Brussels’ bowels, a long way from glitzy EU palaces.

You might expect that this experience only further cemented my resolve to go to Brussels and have a real European career. But this is not what happened. I came back to Slovenia not only with two successfully passed competitions under my belt, but also with a thirst to see the world up close, to experience it the way I experienced Brussels, living where other people live, eating what other people eat and having a blast where other people have a blast.

Almost immediately after my return, I and my girlfriend started planning a long sabbatical in South America. Not only did my exploratory six weeks in Colombia not quench my thirst for travelling, they only enflamed it. Then, just at the end of a long Indian summer last year, as I was browsing airline websites for cheap tickets to Bogota, Buenos Aires and La Paz, an email from the Parliament arrived …

As I look through the window of my office on Rue Montoyer, my view blocked by the EP’s imposing Willy Brandt building, I am thinking about what might have happened had I not seized the opportunity to go back to Brussels. There’s the city’s raw vigour again, its broad avenues, houses packed tightly together on rolling little hills, people from all over the world speaking in tongues you don’t understand – now that I think of it, it really reminds one of Tangiers, as my girlfriend noticed when she first arrived here.

As for the vistas of other continents, they will have to wait – although on a sunny day like this, I can still hear the alluring whisper of lands unvisited.

It is no secret that Facebook has been racing ahead recently, leaving other social networks in its trail. As long as Facebook offered its network in English only, national networking sites, such as Skyrock in France or StudiVZ in Germany fared pretty well. But with translation of Facebook pages into other languages, the language barrier disappeared, and the American company really started growing.

Unfair advantage?

Bosses of European social networking sites have their own explanations for the Facebook success. Although they admit the Americans may have a better product, the chief of StudiVZ Clemens Riedl recently told the Financial Times that his company was not able to compete with Facebook on a level playing field:  “Most things Facebook does are illegal under German law,” he said, refering to the fact that Facebook can share some user data with advertisers, while German competitors are bound by stricter data protection laws.

“Most things Facebook does are illegal under German law,” says boss of leading German networking site StudiVZ.

This makes Facebook a more attractive advertising platform, a huge advantage in times when advertisers are increasingly picky about how much bang they are getting for their buck. Advertising is a single biggest revenue source for most social networks.

Not up to the standard

How exactly does Facebook address EU data protection laws? The answer is found in the so-called safe harbour agreement between the US and the European Union. When the EU data protection directive entered into force in 1998, this presented a conundrum for American companies that, in the course of their business, deal with personal data of European citizens. EU laws specify that the transfer of personal data from the EU to countries that don’t meet the EU data protection requirements is prohibited – and the US data protection laws are not deemed to be up to European standards.

Safe harbour agreements allow those American companies that subscribe to more stringent data protection practices and thus comply with EU requirements to do business in the EU without fearing lawsuits or other business problems.

Wait a minute …

However, according to a 2008 study by Galexia, an independent consultancy specializing in privacy and electronic commerce, the fact that a US company is included on the safe harbour list does not necessarily mean that it treats personal data of European citizens it has in its posession in a manner mandated by European laws.

If true, the results of the study are quite shocking: of 1,597 entries on the list, only 348 organisations satisfied the requirements of the safe harbour network.

German Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner threatened to delete her Facebook profile, if the social networking website does enhance the ways it deal with personal data.

Germans weigh in

The finding that the presence of a company’s name on the safe harbour list might allow US firms to treat EU citizens’ personal data without due consideration of European laws has not been lost on German data protection offices. This month, spurred by the Galexia study, they will debate the ways of how to put things right with regard to perceived violations by US companies of EU data protection laws.

The names of Facebook and Google have been bandied about to show that regulators mean business. In addition, a letter of German Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner to Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, threatening to delete her Facebook profile, if the social networking website does not mend its data protection ways, leaves no doubt about the fact that a regulatory backlash is in the making.

Let’s just hope it does not land in another safe harbour.

Things happen fast on the web. Business models founded on products and services that were all the rage only months ago can be discarded overnight, only to be replaced by fleeting fads that are then almost immediately consigned to dustbins of neat-but-not-so-leet ideas populating the server farms of the world.

Troubles with MySpace

The change in the social networking business has been at least as dramatic. MySpace, the pioneering US social networking website, was bought in 2005 for US$ 580m by Rupert Murdoch, the quintessential and much-reviled media mogul, who also owns such venerable institutions as The Times and Wall Street Journal.

Mr Murdoch hoped MySpace would be a corner stone of his NewsCorp’s digital strategy. Now observers say the latter is in the doldrums. After all, the company’s digital division’s search and advertising revenue has been dropping steeply, leading Mr Murdoch to declare that MySpace “is not where we want it.”

Fast-paced change

And where’s that, precisely? Taking a look at the figures recently released by comScore, it is easy to see why Mr Murdoch who bought MySpace when it was still a market leader by a wide margin is not exactly thrilled by his acquisition’s performance.

Facebook, which had long been seen as just another ambitious upstart, namely managed to overtake MySpace in May 2009 as the leading social network in the US. It finished the year with 112 million visitors in December 2009, a whopping 105 percent increase year-on-year, compared to MySpace’s stagnating 70 million.

Facebook overtakes Myspace

It’s easy to see that, compared to more traditional industries, the pace of change on the web is furious. If it took Toyota more than a couple of decades to overtake General Motors, Facebook needed only three years to race ahead of the incumbent, the once mighty MySpace.

Yet not all is bad for MySpace. Its music-related traffic shot up by 92 percent last year, reflecting the management’s increased focus on making the website a hub for music, games and entertainment. With its thousands of DJ, band and musician profiles and a partnership with three major record labels it seems that MySpace’s strategy is shifting away from social networking as such.

How’s Europe doing?

US digital trends are usually a good forecast for what is likely to happen in Europe. Social networking’s rise has been inexorable on this side of Atlantic too.

Of the 282.7 million European Internet users age 15 and older who went online via a home or work computer in December 2008, 211 million visited a social networking site – representing a penetration of 74.6 percent.

In 2008, for example, Facebook managed to pull ahead of Skyrock, the leading French social networking site, growing incredible 443 percent to nearly 12 million unique visitors in December 2008. Myspace (which, admittedly, was even then a mature business, not expected to grow as quickly as up-and-coming Facebook) lingered far behind, posting 15 percent growth and boasting a little less than three million uniques.  In February 2009 the share of Facebook’s social networking minutes was 30.4 percent, a jump of nearly 20 percentage points over a year earlier.

And the European Parliament?

Where do these trends leave the European Parliament and its social networking strategy? The focus on two global networks as opposed to a myriad of national ones seems right, as the former are well poised to overwhelm the latter. Still, the EP has its delegations in all member states, so maybe social networking can be mainstreamed in the EP’s communication policy on the local level as well.

More importantly, the issue of how to harness Facebook and MySpace into the EP’s communication policy is gaining in stature. Should the EP duplicate its message on both platforms or should it try to differentiate between them? Given the fact that the median age of Facebook users is 35 and that of MySpace’s around 24, this should be a no-brainer.

Facebook getting older, MySpace getting younger

We are not dealing only with two different age groups here, but also with two user groups with distinctively different interests. It seems that MySpace is moving toward a platform focused more on showcasing multimedia content produced by the entertainment industry in its widest sense, while Facebook is evolving into a real social networking website where users take time to establish and maintain their digital identities. The EP’s presence on each of the two platforms should therefore be structured accordingly.